As the Episcopal Church wrestles with its identity, one diocese votes for a future of change.

Not that long ago, an Episcopal priest could accurately be described as being the following: male, white, straight, and English speaking. He looked a lot like Ian Douglas ’80, the newly elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut.

Yet with Douglas’s April consecration before a congregation of 2,000 people that included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, the diocese made a resounding statement: it was time for a change. That this agent of change happens to be male, white, straight, and English speaking only tells part of the story.

It’s easy to talk to Ian Douglas. He has a friendly smile and an open manner, and in conversation, he speaks quietly but clearly and with an assurance that demonstrates a grounding in his faith and convictions.

For the past 22 years, Douglas had served as the Angus Dun Professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’d considered putting his name forward in the past for bishop positions, but the timing had never seemed right. His children were young and his family was established in Massachusetts. However, he and wife Kristin Harris ’79 knew their life circumstances were changing when their oldest son, Luke, had graduated from Middlebury, their middle child, Timothy, was in college, and the youngest, Johanna, was graduating from high school.

Digital extra: An audio slideshow featuring Ian Douglas.

Colleagues suggested he look into the opening for bishop in Connecticut. Douglas had reason to hesitate. In the 225-year-history of the Diocese of Connecticut, a bishop had never been elected from outside the state. “When I read the profile of the position,” he admits, “it so seemed to fit my sense of who I am and what gifts I have to offer that I felt like, okay, I need to do this. And so somewhat on a lark, somewhat with some fear and trepidation, I said, sure, let’s enter this process.”

The process was a quick one. From the time he submitted his name to the time he was publicly nominated, only eight weeks passed. A few months later, in October 2009, when lay people from each of the parishes and all the clergy came together and voted at the diocese’s annual convention, Douglas was elected. “After the results of the first ballot were read, there was a collective gasp from the 800 people there,” says Sylvia Ho, chair of the search committee. “He was almost elected on the first ballot. That has never happened before.” On the second ballot, Douglas had enough votes. He began work February 1.

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During the last decade Douglas has spent a signifcant amount of time traveling around the world to meet with Christian leaders, lay and ordained, in an effort to help them understand what the “new world” of the church is. Douglas discusses this “new world” a lot. In the past half century, the worldwide Anglican community, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, has undergone immense changes that have challenged its historical view of itself. From a predominantly white, male-led, English-speaking, Western industrialized community, it has become a radically plural, global, multicultural membership with 80 million members worldwide. “The historic margins, who have always been in the church, are now achieving their full stature and coming to the table,” Douglas says. “And that includes the margins in the West as well—women, people of color, specifically African Americans, most recently gays and lesbians—who are saying, we’re here and we deserve a place at the table, too. And I say thanks be to God. I think we’re a lot closer to what God is up to in this world, with this plurality represented.”

He suggests, however, that those representing the old hegemonic norms of the Anglican Communion are challenged by the new multicultural demographics of the church and fear they have a lot to lose. “The oldest trick in the book, if you don’t want anything to change, is to get one historically marginalized group, like the African Church, focused on another historically marginalized group, such as gays and lesbians, and if they’re fighting and challenging each other’s authenticity, nothing changes.” So a lot of his work has been to try to provide a frame by which leaders can have “deep and meaningful conversations across their differences and appreciate that they have more in common than the particularities they are focusing on.”

Douglas hopes to draw on the skills he used at the international level in a more localized setting, and he feels that Connecticut is a particularly suitable place.

“It really is a microcosm of the United States,” he says. “Here you have some of the richest counties in the U.S. and some of the most economically challenged cities. You have very rural areas, populated areas, and ocean and mill towns and suburbs, black, white, theologically quite conservative, theologically quite progressive—it’s just got everything.”

And obviously Sylvia Ho’s search committee, and ultimately the diocese, felt that Douglas’s experience reflected where they were headed in these changing times.

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Douglas almost became a long-haul tractor-trailer driver. A political science major at Middlebury, he did not pursue religious studies in college, although he’d always had it in the back of his mind that he might go to divinity school. At graduation, he applied to seven trucking companies and Harvard Divinity School. The trucking idea fulfilled his sense of wanderlust, a desire to reconnect with his working-class roots, and his countercultural reaction to the commonly tread path from Middlebury to the ranks of the employed on Wall Street. Three companies offered him work; Harvard also accepted him. He chose divinity school over the open road.

Since earning his degree and becoming an Episcopal priest, Douglas has seen many changes in the church in the United States. The historic white male leadership has diversified to include women and gays and lesbians. In 1989, the first female bishop was elected, and, in 2003, Gene Robinson became the first gay man to become a bishop. These changes have created a good deal of divisiveness in both the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion. (After Robinson’s ordination and confirmation in New Hampshire, four bishops defected from the church, along with the majority of their dioceses and numerous parishes around the country, totaling about 100,000 members.) The strife was exacerbated at the 2009 General Convention when the church voted to open any ordained ministry to gay men and lesbians.

But when asked how that convention will affect the future of the church, Douglas remains hopeful. The voices heard at the convention were honest. “They were saying this is who we are. We don’t have it figured out. It’s not easy. But we’re being truthful in how we are wrestling with what we think God is up to in our midst. We’re discovering a new way of being a church beyond the politicized divisions that have defined a lot of the church’s conversations in the past few decades. I think as a church we are beginning to find our voice as a whole.”